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This book is built on an extended metaphor, which casts equations as the poetry of science. According to the editor Graham Farmelo (head of Science Communication at the Science Museum in London), great equations and great poems are alike in a number of ways. Both suffer if anything is added, changed, or taken away, both are a rich stimulus to the prepared imagination, and both draw much of their power from their conciseness.

As Tony Gardiner says in at the beginning of this book, "the last ten years or so has seen a remarkable blossoming of public interest in mathematics [but] most of the books produced have been for adults, rather than for students. Moreover, most are in prose format - for those who want to 'read about' mathematics, rather than those who want to get their hands dirty solving problems."

If you watch a steam engine, you may not know how it works but you can soon get a fairly good idea of its behaviour, and you can predict its future behaviour accurately. Even though you don't understand its workings, you can see it's a pretty simple machine, so you can trust it to behave in a simple way: you have confidence in your predictions based on a short sample of its behaviour.

A Beautiful Mind is a touching, emotionally charged film detailing the life of a brilliant academic who suffers from schizophrenia. This affliction slowly takes over his mind and we watch as his life crumbles apart around him.

"I am certain, absolutely certain that...these theories will be recognized as fundamental at some point in the future."
Sophus Lie said these words more than hundred years ago. We know now that he was right, absolutely right. The notions of "Lie groups" and "Lie algebras" are in the vocabulary of every mathematician and physicist today. Lie's theories are indispensable tools for understanding the physical laws of Nature.

Over the last decade, the discipline of neuropsychology has shed light on many aspects of human thought. Brain scans, carefully structured behavioural experiments, and the study of individuals who have suffered brain damage, have taught us much about which abilities are native to humans and which learned; which abilities can be lost and what happens when they are.

Ever since Watson and Crick worked out the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, the role of genetics in biology has grown and grown. Genetic determinism - the belief that we are controlled by our genes and that no other factor is significant - is now all-pervasive.

ver the last hundred years, human understanding of the nature of the universe has expanded at a mind-boggling rate; and over the last forty, Kip Thorne, along with Stephen Hawking, who wrote the foreword to this book, have been among the group of people shining most light into the darkness. But, aware that his research is carried out on behalf of us all, Thorne has not neglected the task of explaining its results to the rest of us.